A History of Mega-Tsunamis: The Story of the 16,000 Foot Wave

I spent Christmas Day of 2004 in Bali. The day after was probably the luckiest day of my life. As you probably remember, December 26th was the day of the Indian Ocean tsunami that took something like a quarter of a million lives from fourteen countries. Indonesia was the hardest hit, and we weren’t affected in the slightest. In fact, we didn’t even know it happened until a few days later when we went into town and found out that we were smack in the middle of one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.

Since then, I’ve found I have a sort of morbid, perverse interest in tsunamis. I think it’s because devastation on that scale isn’t something anyone can wrap their head around until you find yourself in the belly of the beast. I want to understand it, but by some strange stroke of luck, I fell out of the beast’s mouth before it swallowed me.

The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the 2011 Japan tsunami were two of the worst disasters in recent history. With wave heights reaching up to 130 feet, the damage was catastrophic. But those are just a drop in the bucket when it comes down to it, and Real Life Lore put together a video that proves it. History holds some truly big waves–ones so big they changed the course of it.